Black and grey full back tattoo of illustrated women, peacock feathers and cherubs in a detailed Art Nouveau style, shown across the upper and middle back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Full back tattoo of figures and peacock feathers

Back · Black and grey · Photo

A large full back piece shows several female figures with long hair, a cherub, a bat-like creature, flowers and peacock feathers arranged across the shoulders and spine. The work uses dense black linework with fine stippling and solid black areas, with no colour ink. The composition fills the whole back, with figures in the centre and feathers framing the top and sides.

Back Figure Peacock feather Cherub Bat Flower Hair

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The proof came up from the press still smelling of linseed, and Mr Harrow held it to the gaslight the way other men hold a letter they dread. Every line of the garden was mine. I had cut the hatching on the fern fronds, stippled the dark of the lily pools, and set the peacocks' eyes with a needle point because the master said they should look watched.

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The women were his. He had drawn them from three sitters over a winter, none of whom he would name, and he kept their long hair coiled through the whole plate like rope through a capstan. At the foot of the table sat a cherub with a bow, grinning up at the bat that hung above the candles. I had not drawn the bat. I was certain of that, because I had gone over every mark on the block twice with a lens.

Harrow only laughed when I showed him. He said the block had lain in the cellar with the damp, and the bat had grown out of the grain the way mould makes faces on a wall. Then he tapped the proof where the feathers met the ceiling and said the peacocks were the only honest things in London, because they never pretended their eyes were anything but eyes.

That night I went down with a burnisher and a candle and worked the bat's wings flat until the copper shone. In the morning the press was cold, and the new proof showed the bat again, smaller, folded beneath the cherub's heel as if it had been sleeping there all along. I left it there and sent the plate to the printers with the bat still tucked under the child's foot.